A Study On The Cultivation Of Inference Ability In Senior High School English Reading Teaching

Reading comprehension is a very important competence in language learning which involves an interaction between thought and language.Nevertheless,many senior high school students have difficulties in comprehending English reading passages and they do bad in English reading.Inference making ability can help learners read between lines and get the meaning of the text.How to make inferences on unknown words and complicated texts efficiently in reading are what senior high school students need urgently.Therefore,instructing students to derive the meanings of unfamiliar words and complex texts by using proper lexical inferencing strategies and textual inferencing strategies become quite important.During the past few decades,although many researchers have explored lexical inferening strategies and textual inferencing strategies from various perspectives,a majority of them are conducted on the contexts of mother tongue or ESL contexts and rarely with senior high school students.Therefore,it’s worthwhile to make research on the cultivation of Inference Ability in Senior High School English Reading Teaching.Thus,in order to explore the lexical inferencing strategies and textual inferencing strategies applied in senior high school English reading teaching,the study was conducted with classroom observation,one questionnaire,interviews and reading tests as instruments.The present study wants to find out the answers of these research questions:(1)What strategies are applied in English reading comprehension to help improve learners’ lexical inferencing?(2)What strategies are applied inEnglish reading comprehension to help improve learners’ textual inferencing?(3)How do the inferencing strategies help learners to improve reading comprehension ability?In the study,two classes with all together 98 students and 6 English teachers in Shishi High School in Chengdu City,Sichuan Province were involved.Data were collected and analyzed by SPSS and Excel.The audio recordings collected in the interview were transcribed into written words.The study reveals that common lexical inferencing strategies applied in real English classes are synonym clues,explanation clues and word formation,while the insufficient lexical inferencing strategies applied are example clues and reference clues.And the common textual inferencing strategies are making connections and questioning,while the insufficient textual strategies are verifying,self-inquiry and monitoring strategies.However,all the common lexical strategies focus on the analysis of the unknown word itself but lack of using the context to infer the word meaning,the common textual strategies only focus on how to solve the inferring question itself but lack of comprehending the text as a whole.According to results from the study,the author discovers some problems of the cultivation of the inference ability for the senior high school students.The students need teachers’ scaffolding,so the teachers need to help students develop their awareness of recognizing the reading passage as a whole text,meanwhile,they can learn different lexical inferencing strategies and textual inferencing strategies and then apply them in the daily English reading teaching.And the study provides some helpful advice for the English reading teaching and hopes that it can help improve the cultivation of senior high school students’ inference ability and student’ English reading comprehension at the same time.